


100% PURE

by BitchtearsandButtsecks (HandbagMurder)



Series: Homestuck [21]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Drabble, M/M, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 14:49:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandbagMurder/pseuds/BitchtearsandButtsecks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was only 14 days into the rest of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	100% PURE

**Author's Note:**

> i have to stop writing miserable/shitty johndave and write some happy stuff already.

In an apartment like any other, high above the meandering city and yet somehow much too far from touching the stratosphere, there once lived a boy with a tired heart and a clockwork mind, and none of the energy to ever run both at the same time.

Dave Strider had a room much like any other, a nest of possessions in articulate chaos, every degree of organisation (or lack thereof) a testament to some thought, passion, or memory that had passed through his mind the day he deigned to set it there. Each colourful poster on the wall spoke broadly of his worldview, and the tacky Kodak pictures pinned between frames of dusty butterflies (their wings pressed flat and their bodied pierced by innocuous pins) pieced together a portrait of the world identical to the one an individual would see in casual passing. Like the meaningless humdrum of things that flicked past the speeding car window, Dave’s pictures showed all manner of objects with none of the right feeling behind it, and like all things in his life often he found himself sitting lotus in on his bed examining them discontentedly, his frustration amounting to little more than a silent frown and a line on his forehead that, over time, threatened to become a prominent feature of his day to day face.

 

.x.

 

Dave knew a girl called Theresa once, with a wild cackle and a hideously sharp wit, and he had liked her very much. There was something he just really appreciated about her, from her sandpaper voice to her bizarre red reading glasses, and he found himself spending time with her more and more. He hoped that he and Theresa would have the fortune to be best bros forever.

 

.x.

 

The first man Dave ever photographed was his brother. They had been sitting on the sofa and Dave picked up his shitty digital camera, thinking very suddenly that the precise lines of the older man’s chest and arms in his shirt were not only pleasing, but seemed to encompass so many things about humanity that would have usually remained unspeakable. The cotton of his white polo looked so flimsy, the band of flesh and rigid frame of bone beneath it the only protection shielding a naked heart. His arms were so relaxed, and so exquisite, and before he could realise, Dave took a picture.

He printed it out on the shitty HP printer and stuck it on his wall, and when his bro asked why he had a picture of his ‘boobs’ fixed between a frame of butterflies and a spectacularly cheesy kitty calendar, Dave told him it was for the irony.

 

.x.

 

Theresa had some friends that Dave liked. They made him laugh, but they would never have noticed because in public his face remained completely cool and calm at all times. They were a dramatic bunch, and Dave didn’t have so much in common with them but he found they got along. Theresa? Well, he never really thought about what his life might have been like if he hadn’t met the girl on his first day of junior high.

In primary school he hadn’t been a very popular kid.

 

.x.

The first time Dave ever had a crush he told his brother he was going to marry the object of his affections in the coolest way possible, where he rode up the aisle on a skateboard and then they would set off fireworks and everything. His brother had laughed and picked him up, adjusting the pointed shades on his bright, four-year-old face, before departing the kindergarten grounds wherein the teenage son of the head caregiver, and Dave’s husband-to-be, sat with the other children, painting dinosaurs on newsprint paper, wasting his summer vacation away.

 

.x.

 

Dave had been waiting to go to college forever, filled with hope that it might be different to high school and different to his horrible burned out home town, and so it was a good three weeks before he left that he had all his things packed in his suitcase, the bare walls of his bedroom boasting no more than bright rectangles untouched and unfaded by the sun. He even had his bedroom window open, to let out the stale stench of imprisonment in this high-rise hell.

He was going somewhere else now. Somewhere new. Somewhere where he would meet new people and maybe, just maybe, he would cease being an incompetent caterpillar wiggling on a leaf so pointlessly and turn into an admittedly not-so-ironic butterfly instead, his wings a boon to take him wherever he so willed and his current bedroom, an empty shell, little more than the cocoon in which this magical transformation had taken place.

 

.x.

 

Dave used to get frustrated in high school, when time after time he could only ever get a C in art class, the mad world of colour and energy and light he saw when he closed his eyes (dreams of a far away city and a far away man) nothing like the baked and shimmering concrete of Houston, and even less yet like the projections of a grim reality on slightly grey-tinged photographic paper. His men (such beautiful creatures; divine and seemingly designed for documentation) were not acceptable, his hometown insufficient.

It was a prison, it was a pain, and it was lonely, here in an ugly crack of the world.

 

.x.

 

Theresa asked him out and he was too surprised to say no, and he would have been lying if he said he wasn’t happy around her but still there was the fact that he couldn’t hold her hand without thinking of a boy, and he couldn’t even kiss her without wishing that he might open his eyes and she might become a man.

She bore it well for a long while, but she broke it off after two years and slighted, scared, and confused as to why he hadn’t been able to bring himself to want to fuck her, Dave sat up late and asked himself over and over

Am I going to die alone?

It was a mantra, and for so many nights it brought him to an uneasy sleep.

 

.x.

 

Rose Lalonde had a locker by Dave’s in senior year, and neither could really explain how it was that their friendship came about, but somehow Dave warmed to her swiftly and before too long Rose had earned the title of Dave’s only friend. Rose had moved here from New York City. She wanted to go home.

Dave agreed to go with her when they graduated. It would be a marvellous time.

 

.x.

 

The University Dorms were brand new, and Dave moved in and made himself instantly at home. He had a single room, and down the hall five other boys did too, and for twenty floors this was how it was, an arcade of teenagers all fired up and ready to go and change the world one bottle of beer at a time.

Dave met John in the dining hall, but he had seen him in passing before. A man of striking height and broad shoulders; the exact kind that would look so wonderful framed in a camera lens, but were almost guaranteed to escape the loop that was Dave’s minimal point-and-shoot digital skills. John’s eyes were a stunning blue and his hair entirely black, and every detail of him from his cheekbones to his jaw to his cute little smile was enough to make Dave’s heart beat faster and his joints feel composed of over-cooked spaghetti. He was stunning.

“Hi,” John told him, taking a seat opposite steadily. “Mind if I sit here?”

“Uh…” said Dave.

It was his way of saying ‘not at all’.

 

.x.

 

Dave tried to be cool in high school but he lost all of his friends in his break up with Theresa, and in some ways this was sore because now he was alone, yet in others he was glad because he had never realised before how little they had ‘got’ him. How little they had had in common.

Those people had liked gossip, and drama, and generic things, where Dave was about observing, and feeling, and lying awake until one am just bathing himself in the beauty that was a digitally synched beat and riding the imaginary high that came with visualising places, people, and colours that his eyes had never seen. One day he would meet someone like him, who wouldn’t make him feel like a butterfly trapped in a wingless body. One day he would be alright.

But not that day. And probably not tomorrow, either.

 

.x.

 

Dave sat in his bedroom staring at the wall planner, his fingers curled tightly in his jeans and his whole body sore from forcing himself not to cry. Dusty frames of butterflies lay on his desk un-hung, because the dorm demanded no damage be done to his walls, and on the calendar was marked day thirteen exactly since he had moved here, away from his home town.

He had only known John Egbert for six of those days.

And hanging on his back in tatters, his hopes destroyed by his failings and the audacity he had taken to have dreams, were an invisible pair of  wings.

 

.x.

 

Dave’s classes were absolutely, mind-blowingly fantastic.

He had made the right decision, majoring in music.

The medium came so easily to him, and for the first time images sprung from his fingers and materialised in reality, beyond the confines of a mechanical and neurotic blonde head. Shades hid eyes filled with excitement and optimism, day seven of his college experience easily one of the best days of his life.

This was the way that Dave had hoped it would be.

 

.x.

 

John invited Dave to his room, and they hung out, and bit by bit Dave found himself enchanted by John’s jokes and his intelligence, the stack of text books on his desk an indicator of his degree: a bachelor of English literature. How clever.

But Dave didn’t have all that much to say.

He wanted to talk about ambitions. To talk about what he saw and how he tried to show the world around him. He wanted to make jokes, and be entertaining, but he couldn’t. Everything that came out of his mouth just seemed dull because John was so brilliant and perfect, and he deserved every single last thing in the entire world to be passed into his waiting hand.

Instead Dave just remained there listening in awe as he chattered, and thought that he would never, ever, be miserable again.

 

.x.

 

Dave had had a bad day, and nothing could have prepared him for what it was like to walk into former friends and have them look through him as though he wasn’t even there. Like he didn’t exist. Like they didn’t even want him to exist, any more.

It filled him with a frustration, a drive, a need to prove himself to these people, and an empty hopelessness when he realised that he could not. Rose was at a different college on the other side of the city, he was alone here, now.

It was only day twelve of the rest of his life.

 

.x.

 

John and Dave walked to the library because John had wanted to get some books, and even though they had only met the night before Dave agreed to go to the museum with him afterward because who wouldn’t? The man was a complete babe and wow, he wanted some. He knew it was a long shot but what if, just what if there was someone who saw them and thought they were a couple. What if there was someone who mistook them for being together?

It was a weary walk around the museum and eventually they found a seat, Dave dropping into the corner and feeling his entire body tense when John dropped beside him and casually slung his arm around his shoulders.

“It’s pretty cool here right?”

“… Yeah,” Dave managed, looking at the ceiling and the bizarre angles and vivid whiteness of a whale skeleton hanging there, stripped of its consciousness and its soul and leaving only a useless weight behind. “If you like nerd shit.”

John snickered and Dave let his guard down for just a moment, letting himself enjoy the cloying muskiness of John’s scent.

 

.x.

 

“Oh! See I told you you would meet someone.”

Rose seemed so smug over coffee and Dave would have been angry at her if he hadn’t been so excited himself. The memory of John’s hand creeping into his on their walk the night before still made his head spin. It was so surreal. It didn’t fit in with his fantasy world, and it didn’t fit in with the real world, and it all just seemed so wild and intoxicating and he loved it so much he could easily have forgone everything in that moment, just to feel John touch him like that again.

“Only a few days in and you’ve already got a potential beau. Did I not tell you, that you would not die alone under any circumstance?”

 

.x.

 

He started crying, and he was pretty sure he had never felt like more of an idiot in his life.

It had been all of five hours since the man had sat at his table, and already he had fucked it up. He wouldn’t have been surprised if John never wanted to speak to him again. But the other man had been so nice. He had been so kind, inviting him to the music room in the evening and insisting he key notes on the piano to accompany him. He had been so soft spoken and persuasive, and though Dave had denied the offer he couldn’t say no in the end and the tears had flown because when was the last time someone had been so sweet to him? When was the last time he had cried?

He couldn’t remember.

And then John locked his arms around Dave’s shoulders and gave him a tight hug, and Dave cringed in the face of his humiliation because that was the exact moment that Dave decided that he was in love. Hopelessly, ashamedly, infuriatingly in love.

“It’s okay,” John told him calmly. “Tell me if there’s something wrong?”

“It’s fine! I’m cool I just…”

He couldn’t fucking believe he had started crying. He hated himself, but he was glad that he had managed to get John to put his arms around him.

 

.x.

 

Sometimes, Dave thought it would be easier to just stop.

To stop being, to stop dissecting every little thing. To exist only as a simple thought, an idea, an energy that sees and understands all without question, and that didn’t need a camera to remember vivid details or to express every subtle nuance of existence.

Sometimes, Dave thought about dying.

Would dying bring him that comfort? That freedom?

He was too scared to die though, too scared to be bodiless and free and light, 100% pure.

Dave was terrified, beyond all words, of hurting. His sensitive, sheltered childhood, so easy and so reasonless, made sure of that. Too long as a child, too quiet and too introspective. He couldn’t handle agony and he couldn’t handle pain.

And yet so full of frustration, disappointment, and loneliness everything stretched ahead of him so long, so endless and so broken, what could he do?

He would just have to bear it right.

Exactly two weeks down.

Far too many to go.

 

.x.

They had been lying on John’s bed talking idly about the museum they had visited when Dave felt it, a sudden crush of lips on his and an unseen hand that stole the breath from his very chest. It was wet, and it was too rough, and it was unexpected because they had only known each other a total of two days, but Dave was pretty sure that it was the best thing he had ever done.

His first kiss from a boy.

It was right. Just absolutely, completely, perfectly right in every imaginable way.

 

.x.

 

Had they ever really been going out?

Sure, they had kissed, and held hands, and they had been spending time together for four days but already Dave was starting to wonder if John’s interest was waning, but he couldn’t say a word about it because John just treated it as normal and no-one ever acknowledged that they had kissed, that John had pulled Dave into his bed and murmured words against his ear one night, then sat across him at breakfast the next morning with his feet tucked under his chair to avoid footsies and no indicator at all that it had even happened, save the hickey that ached sadly on the right side of Dave’s neck.

And suddenly they weren’t holding hands any more, or kissing, and was Dave boring the other man or what was happening, he just couldn’t tell. When he finally managed to pluck up the courage to ask John why he had kissed him in the first place John said that the moment had just felt right.

Dave remarked that he liked him though. Romantically.

John laughed and assured him he would take Dave on a date in response.

But Dave’s heart sank when he didn’t hold out his hand to hold, and his eyes slipped sideways in avoidance and it went silently unsaid that this was a thing that was never going to happen.

 

.x.

 

It happened so fast. The night before there had been just kisses and suddenly Dave found himself in John’s bed dragging his fingers up the other mans bare back, their trousers still on but John’s erection shoved hard against his leg as he pressed his tongue greedily into Dave’s mouth.

Dave wasn’t sure he was ready, as much as he wanted it to happen, but there was no space for protests even if he was sure he had some but why the fuck should there be? John’s shoulders under his hands were so lovely, and his body smelt so good and the way he ground his hips down too, was delicious. Pleasurable. Dave had never been able to touch a man before, and in a moment of ridiculous triumph he thought of his ex-girlfriend and how he was glad she had dumped him because here he was, and oh god the way John breathed against his ear was so sexy and he wanted him so badly and Dave just wanted to beg for him to cum, his own lust forgotten in the face of the way John was groping hungrily at his sides.

He couldn’t be sure if it happened, but the tempo built fast and in his mind he felt himself approach climax though his body remained unresponsive: little more than a tool for John to help him reach orgasm.

If Dave could get the other man to cum, then he would finally be worth something to someone. Finally precious. He dragged his hands through John’s hair and nibbled on his ear, his hips lifting to serve John pleasure and his lips falling open to loose a single shaking moan when John froze and his breath lost pace.

Dave wasn’t sure if that was a thing that just happened.

 

.x.

 

“It’s only been two days,” Dave managed, in the wake of the kissing that succeeded John’s first bold move. “I just… why did you do that?”

John looked thoughtful, his blue eyes lovely and wide as all the skies above. Closer here, than they ever seemed in Texas. Much brighter too. “Well,” he started, sounding very thoughtful. His lips were dark and so lovely against his skin.

“It’s exciting I guess. You know we might hate each other in a week. We might spend a couple of years having fun together. That’s exciting.”

Dave thought, in just a moment of weakness, that perhaps that was exciting after all. Just a little bit.

 

 .x.

_His eyes are oceans_

_Reflecting the universe._

_The universe is me_


End file.
